Brian Eno, and the fine line between clever and stupid

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. (via)

So, this is a decently perceptive comment, altough I doubt very many people are taking advantage of the ubiquity of culture to access Hildegaard of Bingen, to use his example. Or that it's made her more or less "cool."

Why is Brian Eno, of all people, framing things in terms of cool/uncool as if he was a tweener from Dubuque?

Celebrating the end of the division implies that it mattered, once.

And it should never matter to genuine adults. (You could cite the exception, perhaps of  marketers and the sellers of culture who could make money out of the notion that consuming something makes you cool.  But that's not paricularly cool, either.)